ADAPTING AND INFLUENCING YOUR COMPANY'S CULTURE

Organisational?culture is important in a new employee's experience in a company. It also affects the current employees as well. There are various cultures that you as an employee will face when working for a company. This can be national, organisational, department, or peer culture. How do you as a new employee get involved in a new company? How do you adapt when moving into a new role or new country? The article discusses the approaches new employees can use to adapt and influence the company's culture. These approaches can be applied whether you are a junior, middle, or senior employee. This is also applicable when you are creating a new company as a founder.

Culture has been thrown around as a political hot potato. We see it globally in different countries where politicians are trying to battle for control or to become the arbiter of culture. Questions should be asked.

????????Are you a contributor to the culture?

????????Are you an influencer of the culture?

????????Are you an appropriator of the culture?

????????Are you an assimilation of culture?

????????Are you a gatekeeper to the culture?

????????Are you a guide on the culture?

What we should do, is understand what culture is. I will apply an institutional economist view of it – since my PhD background was institutional economics. I use institutional economics because it provides a framework for explaining why certain rules, practices and traditions become norms.

Culture can be seen as embedded behaviours that are practised by social groups. These practices are considered normal actions when people from the same social group interacts. These norms are influenced by various factors – history, politics, religion, geography, economics, science and technology, natural and built environment, gender, sexuality, and biology. Culture embeds itself into informal institutions, customs, traditions, norms, and religion.

Culture has structure, legitimacy, stickiness, filters and isomorphism. Culture has structure because it is made up of different elements. It has legitimacy because there are formal and informal rules. It is sticky because it persists over time among different participants. It is learned because it filters our behaviour. It can be different forms so it is isomorphic.

In this article, I will dissect these five components. We use this understanding of culture to prepare ourselves as future engineering managers. Because as managers and even as professional staff, we can influence the culture of the organisations we are part of.

To do that I will be using case studies of my experiences influencing organisational culture across different companies and countries.

We can influence the culture via different methods. Recruitment, Onboarding and People Operations have a structured and directed feel. You are deliberately determining what type of people you want to include in your company. They bring their own attitudes and biases into the organisation. Depending on where they are hired, they can impact the culture as well. When you get to your Onboarding and People Operations side of things you get some organic components to it. Also, this is the more difficult part of being an Engineering Manager. How do you influence your company culture via your recruitment, on-boarding and people operations?

I have been involved in recruiting people for around 20 years now. The recruitment can be for volunteer leadership positions on high school sports teams, staffing three country offices or international recruitment of staff for a partner company. The one thing that I have always considered is will this person fit into the organisation. We often hope that the person you hire can culturally fit into the company you work for. However, the culture fit approach may clash with the culturally diverse approach. In other words, are we just hiring people who look and sound like us because it makes it easy for the organisation to maintain a certain organisational culture? Or should we be hiring people from varied backgrounds that provide alternative viewpoints that can expand the organisational culture?

To answer the first question, there are justifications for hiring people from the same group to fit into your company culture. You think and operate more in sync with each other – decision-making is generally easier but not always. However, groupthink can easily slip as there are not enough alternate views. Additionally, toxic company behaviour can develop and this has real-world implications in terms of products and services being offered to the public. As Engineering Managers, we should establish and support a diverse workforce. Because we know alternative views ensures that we are innovating. We take into consideration the lived experiences of people, who will use our products and services.

As a recruiter, I am doing a holistic approach to the recruitment strategy. I recruit across genders, ethnic groups, countries of origins and languages. Because I work in technical environments, the academic qualifications get you in the door. Then we look at how competent you are on the software tools. While it is nice to say we just look at qualifications and competency, I must also consider gender balance. I work in construction, an area where there is dominance by applicants who present as male. In the last few positions, we have recruited for – I have pushed for recruiting staff who may present as female.

While this is all and good, what I have noticed is that pool of female-presenting candidates is smaller than male-presenting candidates. Now fixing this shortage is beyond the webinar. What I can say here is we have to encourage more girls into STEM subjects at high school and support them at universities. Because I and every other recruiter who have diversity & inclusion goals are targeting the same 10 – 20 females to the 80 – 90 males out of a talent pool of 100 candidates.

Once, we hire our culturally and linguistically diverse staff – we can further influence them based on the onboarding. As Engineering Managers and Peer Buddies, we introduce them to how we work. We can indoctrinate them in the process and procedures. All of the operational ways of working contribute to culture. On-boarding has both a formal and an informal component. From explaining how to register a design change in your document management system to knowing which colleague in the office is the best troubleshooter. The quirks of an office or teams are not always written down but told as oral history. This oral historian for a company can be the longest person at the firm or sometimes that person who is really good as an orator. You can end up being an oral historian. Sometimes, it happens inadvertently – I became the company historian when I was the first hire for a start-up firm in Trinidad and Tobago. Because I was the longest employee and also an orator, I became a symbol of the company culture. Here in Australia, because I am the one who looks at on-boarding – I am the oral historian.

In democratising culture creation, we don’t always have to depend on the head of the company to initiate everything. Yes, we may need tacit approval; but these things work best when they are produced from the ground up. We see this in how we use company games. In Australia, there is a general love for Trivia and drinks. I had to get used to drinking in the office on Friday afternoon! I was like what madness was this. Our cadets/interns were responsible for creating the Trivia questions. Over time, it moved to Scattegories and Online Trivia, which worked better with MS Teams during the WFH situations with Covid19. When the cadet got hired into the company, they looked after the games. We have expanded to Word Scrabble in the morning. Even though it was initially started by one of the senior staff, it has since been handed over to a more junior staff member to maintain. That staff member was really good at Scrabble. These games were a good conversation starter for everyone. It was added as part of the culture.

The use of company meals and drinks is one of the simplest and most effective ways of influencing company culture. Because the company has an international staff, we have had interesting company meals and games as we get to know about each other’s culture. At our offices in Sydney and the Gold Coast, there are different departments. They have their rituals around meals. We have the coffee club – where the Planners go for their coffee every morning. Even during the lockdown, when the staff were WFH they would meet up on MS Teams. This was done over three different cities – Gold Coast (Yugambeh), Melbourne (Naarm) and Sydney (Warrang). The Gold Coast team is a smaller office – so it is a whole-of-office affair. While the Sydney – Melbourne mix was because one of the Sydney staff members transferred to Melbourne this year. Another department, i.e., the CAD department would do monthly dinners based on the home culture of the staff member, who chose the restaurant. Here, we see the intersection of peer and national cultures working together to produce a department/office specific culture. This was an organic creation of the departments doing their company meals. Throughout the year, we did companywide meals – Welcome Back Tea, the Biggest Tea (Cancer Awareness Fundraiser Event), Christmas Dinner and Start of Summer Holidays meal.

The final piece of the puzzle of organisational culture is people operations. This is the ongoing management of your subordinates, peers and your superiors. People operations become adaptable because your organisational culture can experience shocks that it has to adjust to. We as engineering managers have to now adapt to external factors that affect the way we interact with staff. The cultural minefield can seem a lot. However, I approach it with learning and understanding where my privileges lay. We have had to deal with attempted coups, black lives matter, aboriginal lives matter, climate crisis, #metoo, Covid19 pandemic, vaccine hesitancy, refugees, border closures, rising energy prices. All these external factors weigh on people’s minds. They can’t turn it off when they come to work.

I based my People Operations on a framework of equity, equality, lived experiences, science and technology, and social constructs. Probably because I had an institutional economics background – I have been able to structure how we approach these external factors. Engineering Managers have to navigate numerous factors that influence people’s interactions. As a Covid Marshal, I have had to bring staff along to understanding vaccination mandates, border restrictions and hygiene practices. I approach this as learning moments – and allowing staff to ask questions. I personally messaged each staff member to understand how they are coping with Covid19. Because of our staff coming not just from Australia but internationally, we had a shared experience. We avoid the political discussions where possible in an official all staff discussion but still engaged during peer-to-peer discussions. This acknowledges that staff may have different political views, but the company did not take them aside. However, it helped that a majority of staff opted for vaccination before the industry mandates were issued. This made it easier for discussion around Covid19. While Covid19 may be the issue at hand now – there are other minefields waiting for the engineering manager to trip up.

My advice is to establish a framework to make your decision. Understand your privilege based on socio-economic and cultural factors. As your decision making may be biased because of those factors. Consult with people. Then make your decision.

You can watch the recording of this webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5iy4r3iq14